Home > Topic > the duration
21 " That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony. "
― Hermann Hesse , Gertrude
22 " The marine corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not, he will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that marine: he has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier, or swabbie, or desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell. "
― Steven Pressfield , The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
23 " In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful.The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable.This is invaluable for an artist.Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable.The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell." Page 68 "
24 " Patience isn't tested when it is self-imposed and the duration is self-regulated. Patience is hardly tested when the outcome means little to you. However, when circumstances beyond your control force you to wait with baited breath knowing the outcome will affect your life substantially, that is the true test of patience. It is a cage inside a burning building where every exit is blocked by angels calmly advising you to wait a moment longer. Your choice is to either trust their words or madly claw through them. "
― Richelle E. Goodrich , Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year
25 " ARE YOU LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED? Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the intensity you've hoped for?Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the duration of our lives - exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine! - but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being " spent," and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the marjority of cases, just the opposite. If you are, in fact, living the life that your maker intended - it may be time to seek another maker. "
26 " Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product. "
― Victor Shklovsky
27 " Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being. "
― Plutarch , Moralia
28 " I must endure, fighting the temptation simply to become slack-jawed like most of my school 'peers' (they wish!), who will themselves into a collective, vacant, trancelike state for the duration of each class. (Although I sometimes secretly envy their ability to empty their minds completely for a full fifty minutes, reanimating only at the sound of a bell, like Pavlov's dogs...) "
― Beth Fantaskey , Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side (Jessica, #1)
29 " Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don't care if they're sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English. "
― Heather Brewer , Eighth Grade Bites (The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, #1)
30 " [T]he ABCP market was built on a fatal flaw: a significant mismatch between the duration of the underlying assets (long-term) and the duration of the paper itself (short-term). While this structure is not unusual -- banks use it all the time -- the crucial difference is that banks have a strong liquidity provider in the event of a problem: the Bank of Canada. The trusts, however, were left in limbo. "
― Paul Halpern , Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis
31 " The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. "
― Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
32 " Until now, I've been writing about " now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of " actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the " now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second.In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar " tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go " tick-tock" at all; it goes " tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe " tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes " tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: " ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry. "
33 " Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma. "
― Bessel van der Kolk , Psychological Trauma
34 " Wine?" said Zoe. " At two in the afternoon?" " I've decided to become an alcoholic. Just for the duration of my middle years." She filled a glass and rested it on the edge of the washbasin. " That's yours. "
35 " It is not the strength but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men. "
36 " The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments "
